Here is an article telling us that the housework war should be over already because a) men are doing just as much work as women now, b) so, women need to quit complaining and get over it, and c) men need a bit more gratitude from women for their contributions. Funny that.
Funny that you can be told the work is being split evenly in the same breath that you are being told that there is just this little bit of extra work assigned only to you. The task of gratitude, get to it lady.
The article, “Why Men and Women Should End the Chore War” by Ruth Davis Konigsberg really overplays its hand on a couple of areas of work and family data.
First problem:
So a year and a half into a new decade, it may come as a surprise to you, as it did to me, to discover that on balance, husbands and wives have never before had such similar workloads. According to data just released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, men and women in 2010 who were married, childless and working full time (defined by the BLS as more than 35 hours a week) had combined daily totals of paid and unpaid work — which is to say, work at the office and all the drudgery you have to do at home — that were almost exactly the same: 8 hr. 11 min. for men, 8 hr. 3 min. for women.
Looking at married men and women without children (everything is very heteronormative from here on out, sorry) is not a great way to tell the story of the ‘work and family’ juggling act. Yes, of course these couples have family responsibilities, and yes, some will also have caring responsibilities (eg. elder care), but they’re not the ideal category for drawing big conclusions about how ‘work and family’ tasks are being balanced. Because as many mothers will tell you, their relationships were in most ways a lot more equal before children came along.
Second problem:
For those who had children under the age of 18, women employed full time did just 20 min. more of combined paid and unpaid work than men did, the smallest difference ever reported. No, men were not doing the same amount of housework as women, but neither were women pulling the same number of hours at the office as men.
And.
Bianchi was looking at almost everything but housework — education, earnings, changes in employment — so she became aware of the pitfalls of focusing only on the domestic sphere. “Maybe men really were all jerks and not doing their fair share, or maybe they were allocating their time to other things. By isolating housework from other kinds of work, you lost track of the fact that families need money as well as time, and men were doing a lot of that,” she says. “I began to get interested in what we really know. We think men don’t do anything, but is that right? Are we systematically missing what they do do?”
No, the real question is how are the visible, income-earning hours of work divided between the couple with respect to the invisible, unpaid hours of work? Who is doing more of which type of work? The long-term disadvantage in specialising in unpaid work is significant – if you do more of the unpaid work and your partner does more of the paid work what happens in the event of a divorce? What happens to your retirement savings as an individual? What happens to your ability to win a promotion when and if you re-focus back on your career? Can you ever catch up to your partner’s earning power and if you can’t, can your career ever be prioritised over his career in the relationship?
You can be very happy as a stay-at-home mother, you can love the job and find the pursuit intensely satisfying, you can even have actively negotiated for that choice yourself but this doesn’t stop stay-at-home mothers as a group from facing various long-term vulnerabilities. And conversely, being the partner who does all the paid work gives that person a certain leverage in the relationship that shouldn’t be overlooked in any discussion of The Chore War.
Third problem:
What’s more, new research on working fathers indicates that they’re the ones experiencing the most pressure. In a July report called, tellingly, The New Male Mystique, the Families and Work Institute surveyed 1,298 men and concluded that long hours and increasing job demands are conflicting with more exacting parenting norms. The institute had launched the survey to follow up on its 2008 finding that 60% of fathers said they were having a hard time managing the responsibilities of work and family, compared with only 47% of mothers in dual-earner couples. “Men are feeling enormous pressure to be breadwinners and involved fathers,” says Ellen Galinsky, the institute’s director. “Women expect more of men, and men expect more of themselves.”
Note the question being answered here and the one that isn’t. Men say they are finding it more difficult to juggle the dual responsibilities of work and family, but are they actually doing more of the juggling – are they managing more family responsibilities?
Because…
Fourth problem:
What these new findings mean is that the widespread belief that working mothers have it the worst — a belief that engenders an enormous amount of conflict between spouses — is simply not the open-and-shut case it once was. Quantitatively speaking, we have no grounds to stand on. And it’s time that women — myself included — admit it and move on.
That’s a hell of an admonishment for women, with little data to support the case.
Fifth problem:
Men are doing a lot of child care too — an average of 53 min. a day in 2010 for children under 18, which is almost three times as much as they did in 1965. Working women are doing an average of 1 hr. 10 min. a day, which is only 17 more min., but the compulsory aspect of it may contribute to the feeling of being more time-poor.
And why do articles like this one expect us to celebrate equality before we have actually reached it? Why are working women expected to celebrate a result that still has us two hours a week behind fathers? Can’t working women save their joyous fist pumps for the time when our male partners are doing the same amount of caring work as us, or even, when full-time working men are doing two hours more child care than their full-time working partners?
Sixth problem:
The group that has benefited the most from women’s entering the workforce is, ironically, stay-at-home mothers, whose husbands are doing more child care as a result of the larger cultural shift toward involved fatherhood and who now stand out as uniquely low in their total workload.
Admirable that this article counts unpaid work, not so great that it systematically ignores the threat to status and security one faces in doing the unpaid work. Because what kind of benefit is it when your job doesn’t even exist in most measurements of productivity?
Final problem.
Exactly what is being counted when we say women and men do similar amounts of housework? Any time an article talks about the division of labour in a family here are a couple of questions to be asked.
Who does the majority of the ‘outside chores’ and who does the ‘inside chores’? Because there’s a lot less ‘outside chores’ and they tend to be the kind that get undone a lot less quickly than the ‘inside chores’. Paint the wall and it won’t need painting again for another five to ten years, mop the floors and they’ll need doing again tomorrow.
Are the chores women do able to be put off until later, to be organised at a time more convenient to the woman? For instance, fixing the gate or mowing the lawn can be done any time over the next two weeks, making dinner and bathing the children have to be done right now, this very second. It doesn’t matter how tired you are, how much work you had to bring home with you, how bad your headache is and how much you just want to sit down for ten minutes and watch the evening news, kids need feeding. That kind of pressure counts in the workload.
Are men and women equally sharing the work of organising all this stuff? The work of organising often doesn’t get counted in these surveys because a lot of it goes on inside someone’s head, but it’s bloody taxing work. Walking someone through all the steps in preparing a meal, making sure you haven’t run out of laundry powder for when it’s their turn to do the laundry, writing the shopping list for them and describing where on the aisles they will find the items they need to buy.. all draining work.
Are ‘social and psychological chores’ being counted in the survey? Making sure the family meets its social obligations and remains connected to its community is work – were birthday presents bought for children’s parties, did the mother-in-law get a phone call to wish her well in surgery tomorrow? Who is keeping an eye on how well the children are adjusting to the new school? Who went to the parent-teacher interviews? Who worries about whether it is time to see the pediatrician about the younger child’s night terrors?
And finally, what does ‘free time’ look like for each partner? One thing the article does acknowledge well are the gender differences in leisure, not only do women get less of it but the quality of their leisure time is worse.
Researchers are also discovering differences in how men and women experience time, especially free time. Liana Sayer, a sociologist at Ohio State University, and Marybeth Mattingly, now at the University of New Hampshire, found that whereas in 1975 free time reduced feelings of being rushed for men and women alike, by 1998 it no longer reduced time pressure for women. Not only do women report having less free time than men now, but also the quality of that free time has worsened. “We suspect that it has to do with shifts in how women are spending their free time, which is increasingly devoted to a blend of child care and leisure activities,” says Sayer, who notes that this leads to leisure’s being “contaminated” by less pleasurable activities or “fragmented” by interruptions — when you’re reading on the couch, say, and get called away every 15 minutes to referee a squabble or find a missing Lego piece or administer a snack. According to the University of Maryland’s time-diary studies — which, unlike the BLS’s, collected data on tasks occurring simultaneously — in 1975, mothers combined 25% of their child-care activities with leisure activities. By 1998, that had risen to 50%. And even the most dedicated mother would probably admit that there’s a qualitative difference between having an adults-only meal with friends and going out for pizza with those same friends and a bunch of kids.
The gender inequity that persists, then, is in access to high-quality leisure time, which, for whatever reasons, men seem more able to claim — and protect from contamination — than women. The obvious cost of this leisure deficit is that women have less opportunity to relax in a way that recharges their batteries.
There is an interesting story here in this article. Men are under strain – they have it harder than previous generations of fathers, they are attempting a huge shift in roles and they’re finding it difficult. But this is not the story of how everything is pretty equal now and mothers should stop banging on about how tired they are and instead pat men on the back a little more.
(After I wrote this piece I noticed Ms Magazine has also covered it, really well and from a fairly similar angle to my post).
Yes yes.
“[…] 2008 finding that 60% of fathers said they were having a hard time managing the responsibilities of work and family, compared with only 47% of mothers in dual-earner couples”: er, could that self-reporting of strain have *anything* to do with what men and women grew up expecting for ourselves, what seems an ordinary requirement and what seems an extraordinary contribution?
Also, I suspect we’d find that women with children under, say, 8 … or 2 … (rather than 18) see a greater average discrepancy in childcare responsibilities/time than 17 minutes a day. I was thrown by the total average childcare time of 2 hrs 3 min. per day, until I remembered that maybe 17-year-olds don’t require quite as much hands-on time as my 5-year-old. Like they can shell their own eggs and reach high shelves and bathe independently and stuff. (My male partner actually does wildly more of the parenting and housework right now than I do, so I’m not complaining from a personal perspective, but these numbers are not taking everything into account in a clear way.)
And I think your point about organizing and social/psychological chores is especially important. Not just ‘who takes the sick child to the pediatrician?’ but ‘who did the research and chose that pediatrician in the first place? who monitors whether that relationship is working out or you need to switch to a new doctor? who remembers to make the appointment for a routine checkup, vaccinations, etc.? who remembers to pay the bill on time? who makes sure there are stamps for mailing it?’ I doubt much of that gets counted as work very often, but sometimes it can feel like the most crushing or arbitrarily unfair bit of all.
This is a great post.
You did a much better job of taking this apart than I did when I first came across it. I just focused on the “but maybe the women would rather be doing less at home and more at work and can’t because someone has to make the damn dinner” angle.
I also wondered what would have happened if the research had matched men and women by career type. The (admittedly small) surveys I’ve seen in which that is done don’t look so good. I referenced one on academic scientists in this post:
http://www.wandering-scientist.com/2010/01/housework-logistics.html
In that survey, the men and women are doing the same number of hours at work while the men do far less at home (on average, of course).
I think the reason things slide so much more out of balance when kids come along is because that requires a different type of division of the work. Before kids, we could just split all chores 50-50. I cook one night, he cooks the next. He takes one car to the mechanic, I take the other. Etc., etc. But then you have a baby, and suddenly two things happen: (1) you have a lot less time, so the benefits of specialization become more evident. I am faster at X and he is faster at Y, so I should do X and he should do Y. (2) if you are breastfeeding (and probably even if you aren’t although I don’t really know about that since I breastfed) there is a whole class of work that he cannot participate in equally. In our house, this meant we very explicitly decided he’d do more of some of the other work, like dishes. But this is a hard thing to truly balance, because how do you factor in the fact that some of my baby-feeding/comforting work happens at 2 a.m., while the dishes never wake you up in the middle of the night?
That said, I do think it is important to acknowledge that there are some men out there who truly are pulling their weight at home- i.e., that some couples have figured this out. I think this is important not so much because I think those men or their spouses deserve a gold start, but because I think it is important to acknowledge that this is NOT a problem without a solution. It is very much solvable, but it requires two partners who want to solve it. (And yes, I could myself and my husband in the group of people who have this worked out- usually.)
“the widespread belief that working mothers have it the worst — a belief that engenders an enormous amount of conflict between spouses —”
Ohhh right, because it’s simply the mere belief that there is an imbalance that causes the inequality, which was never there to begin with, we just think it is and therefore there is spousal conflict?! /sputter Dear sweet Jesus. I guess my five-year-old head was just believing it saw my mom come home from a full work day and prepare dinner for the kids and wrangle us into bed while my dad came home from a full work day (where, of course, he was paid more, even though he had the less education of the two) and sit on his ass in front of the telly.
And my belief in this will surely cause strife in my future heteronormative marriage, naturally – because I’m incapable of using the empirical powers of observation to note whether or not chores are being divided equally among partners.
My head just exploded.
Mine too. Hahaha! Some people will never ‘get’ it.
As always, thank you for talking about the uncounted organizational work of a household. I am personally grateful for this, because I knew there was something inequitable in my pushing for meal planning, pushing for food making, his insistence that I “tell him what to do” around the house (in detail, every time), but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It’s not that it took a lot of time exactly, especially since so much of it was just in my head while I was doing other things, but it did take a lot of energy. It wears me out.
And I have to admit I resented how much appreciation he got for doing the dishes or doing the laundry or changing a diaper. I wanted him to be appreciated generally; I don’t think I’m an ungenerous person; but nobody ever appreciated me for changing a diaper. It was always assumed by others that a diaper that needed changing would be changed by me. If I did it, no trumpets. If he did it, “Oh, you’re so lucky that he’s willing to change diapers!”
“Well, yes? I guess? Although it seems to me that anyone willing to leave another human being sitting in their own excrement or urine is kind of a jerk?”
I figured out what diapers we would use, how to fold them, what covers we would use, bought them, what detergent we should use to wash them, bought that, what settings to use on the washer. So yes, we both change diapers. And washed diapers (he asked me about the settings every time). And even folded diapers. And I was told that I was so lucky to have him, and I should be so grateful. He was told that he was so awesome, so much better than most men, such a great guy, but never that he was lucky to have me, or that he should be grateful for me or the work I did.
Even when we both did unpaid work, he got paid (with compliments).
Great post! And, like Kenzie, I especially agree with the fact that the organizational work needs to be taken into account. While two people may spend the same amount of time actually doing the dishes and preparing the meal, if one of those people had to plan that meal, make the grocery list, find the recipe, etc. then that work is not really equal, even if the minute by minute countdown comes out the same.
I do think that men today are balancing more than they ever have without as many cultural supports for that change, but that change isn’t going to happen by regressing back and giving them a cookie for doing equal work. That change starts to happen when we find more equitable ways to divide unpaid and paid labor as a cultural value.
One of the things I’ve noticed of late is that I can never ring up and say, “I need to finish something off, so I’m going to be late tonight”, and just assume that the children will be cared for and the meals cooked. My Nigel is fairly much free to organise his work time in whatever way suits him, whereas my work time is always constrained.
Making sure the family meets its social obligations … did the mother-in-law get a phone call to wish her well in surgery tomorrow?
I just don’t do the in-law work any more. I’ve said to My Nigel that I’m very happy to participate in family events, but I will organise our participation my my family’s events, and remember to make the phonecalls etc. with respect to my family, and it’s up to him to do the same for his family.
From the beginning the Bloke and I have taken responsibility for our own family things. I don’t remember his parents birthdays and he doesn’t remember mine. If his Mum calls and starts asking me questions about what our plans are about something I generally say I don’t know (which is usually true) and defer to him for information. We have little hope that this will sink in for everyone outside our house, but it’s the message we want our son to hear.
While I never got a round of applause for changing nappies, or remembering to cook dinner, he never gets trumpets for going to work. I have noticed that I get gushing about my capacity to manage it all when I tell people my work hours. Then obviously when I say that he does all the dropping off and picking up and lunch making he gets much more gushing.
[…] Time Magazine has an article about the chore wars. Don’t read it: just go straight to Blue Milk’s analysis – Before we call a truce on The Chore War. […]
My situation is that my male partner is a stay at home dad. Yet I still do organismic, emotional scut work and research. Exacerbated by my career (I work with young people so there’s a lot of stuff I pick up through that work). But I’m the one pointing out that swimming lessons are great and all, but I’d rather see her go to the fucking library once a week. I’m the one cooking up safe paint for her, I’m the one researching wheat free stuff, I’m the one looking after our diet, even if I don’t do all the cooking.
Yet, I still don’t get “oh isn’t it nice that you help around the house”. I work longer hours than any of my relatives sans the builder, yet I’m held to the same mothering, cleaning and housekeeping standards as stay at home parents. With the opposite for my partner. When they visit it’s why I haven’t scrubbed the cupboards, or told my partner to. I refuse to give him a chores list so I’m the bad guy…
Yup, I have stay at home dad, work full time and STILL cook the dinner, do the laundry, go to the supermarket, do all the gardening (which is the neverending outside chore) etc. Then people tell me how *lucky* I am that he’s willing to stay at home.
FWIW, actually it is bloody hard to work full time then try to juggle getting enough time with your kids at evenings and the weekend too. So I do have some sympathy for f/t working dads on that level.
…I’m not sure what organismic work has to do with organizing…
omg are you supposed to mop the floor every day? I am so failing at this unpaid work business
😛
Hi again, thanks for your breakdown and critique of the paper –
I’ll see if I can read carefully and respond – but – the thing for me is a step back from these balancing acts.
Something that became clear in my research was ‘the male gatekeeper’. This means that sure in the enlightened households – particularly where there is extended family support and a – father/man about the house – who does his fare share when the woman of the house has a job (preferably a career) to go back to (that is naurally flexible and sympathetic) – well maybe things can be square. Oh yer and often in these houses it may be that there will be a nanny and/or a housekeeper around to fill in those inevitable gaps.
But, for many others where the chips don’t fall the same way – the system is against them – the vast majority I would suggest.
How do these balancing acts work for sole parent families where in loads of cases the dad hardly pays maintenaince let alone puts out the washing and organises the birthday parties.
Yes, I used to talk about my ability to work part time for nine years while my two kids got into middle primary as a privilege (supportive dad and reasonable financial security) now I’m back looking for work its a different story – HELP.
And what about all those dads out there who discover that they are in love with their co-worker or something and move on – or turn on their partners who have become vunerabe over the years and often end up staying because of the kids.
My daughter suprised me the other day talking about ‘mid-life-crisis clothes’ I said what do you mean – is there such a thing still today – she says – yer sure you see those women all the time. I know what she means – have I been putting my head in the sand – trying to be positive??
Care matters – and this is the care of infants and children, the aged, the disabled, the sick the vulnerable and women are doing the bulk of this ‘care work’. Whether it is within families, or within the community/care sector (for low wages).
I think these kinds of arguments that are focusing so closely on how couples might or might not be organising their households are missing the point.
best, Joannie
I’m finding Deborah’s point is the one affecting me most at the moment: the powerlessness of not being free to make the decision about quantity or distribution of labour. Partner is working stupid, economic-downturn-means-let’s-understaff-and-expect-remainder-to-work-two-people’s-load hours, which sucks for him. But if he decides that he needs to get home at 8 or 10 or 12 tonight, he is also choosing for me to do all the child feed/bathe/bed work in the evening, instead of only part of it, and I don’t get to decide whether or not to do it that day. I am also fantasising about getting stuck into my book (contract deadline 31 December, thank you very much), and keeping working on it as long as I need, the way he can with his job.
@Deborah: and the really irritating thing about the in-law work is that if he slacks on it, oftentimes you’re still the one held responsible for it.
The gender inequity that persists, then, is in access to high-quality leisure time, which, for whatever reasons, men seem more able to claim — and protect from contamination — than women.
I love in this the bland “for whatever reasons”. The reason is, I believe, that men in situations where this happens feel guilt free about allowing the burden of interruptions to fall on the female partner so that their own leisure time is uninterrupted, because there is an assumption that the child care they do is essentially voluntary and therefore able to be put aside. However much child care the man does, it’s “really” the woman’s job and he is therefore entitled to spaces of leisure time where he doesn’t even have to think about how the burden is being picked up if he’s not shouldering it.
The social/psychological/organizational thing is huge, and I don’t even have kids yet. My partner is fully willing to do his half of the chores (minus cooking, which is on me because it’s my hobby, although not much of a hobby at 9:00 on a tuesday after work/exercise/errands but that’s another story). But even in order for him to do his half I have to organize it. He’ll fold/hang/put away all his own laundry for example, but it’s me who has to track is it time to do laundry, do we have quarters/soap, what actually needs washing. Or I can do it in terms of shared chore time, e.g. “can you clean up the dinner dishes, I’m going to clean the catbox and put a load of laundry in”. Chances of him just cleaning up without me asking = zero. Chances of me just asking “can you clean up, I cooked dinner” = also zero.
It is to the point where I would actually love for him to have his parents over more often, because it’s the only time that I know that I can just leave for work and come home and he will have taken the initiative to clean the place by himself.
This makes me crazy and I just don’t want to fight it out every day/week/month.
I mean this in the least judgmental way possible… but couldn’t you just not worry about his laundry? Do your own and let him realize that he doesn’t have quarters or soap for his. Presumably he managed to do his laundry before he met you, right?
I get that this is less efficient in the short term. But it might help in the long term. We share doing laundry here, but there are kids on the scene. And we both keep track of it. Actually, we just both know that we’ll have about four or five loads of laundry to do every weekend and one of us gets it started as soon as possible on a Saturday morning. This was obviously harder before we had our own place, when we had to worry about getting time on a shared washer.
On the other stuff- have you tried just agreeing on a rule? In our house, before we had kids, the rule was that the person who didn’t cook had to do the dishes. Exceptions required asking. Now with the kids, its more fluid- it is whoever is done getting their assigned kid for the night to sleep first. In general, I’m a big fan of having the discussion to set up the expectations and just expecting that we’ll both stick to whatever was agreed in that discussion.
I’m going to stop now because I’m getting all nostalgic for life without kids!
But seriously, this only gets harder when kids come along. If you’re serious about this guy, figure this crap out now.
Brilliant response. No one ever talks about the whole organization of all household chores/schedules. That’s another chore in and of itself.
I also hate the in-law thing. In my household, I’m responsible for my side and he’s responsible for his. Luckily I don’t think his parents hold me responsible for forgetting or gift-giving. My sister in law (on his side of the family) is another story but I really don’t care!
I made a promise that if my sons marry and forget my birthday, forget to write thank you notes, etc.. I will not hold their wives responsible.
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[…] Time Magazine has a piece on the chore wars. Blue Milk takes it apart: Before we call a truce on The Chore War. […]
I do think this reinforces a stereotype that is unhelpful…or maybe several. The whiny feminist….and the beleagured (sp?) male. I am so thankful for the help my husband has given at home through the years…we have 7 children, and I have Lyme disease. He works very hard at the office and often comes home and helps the kids make dinner, helps put them to bed, etc. I do not have an outside job but we homeschool. *However* I will note that after living in our most recent home for over 2 years, one evening when asked to put sheets on a bed my hubbie insisted he ‘did not know where the linen closet was’. Hahaha!!! I will admit that i don’t know how to change the oil (although I do change tires). One thing you pointed out is significant: how the non-paid worker can tend to be disenfranchised in decision making, etc. That has happened in my marriage many times. I can end up feeling like the (non)-paid help if we’re not careful. Great blog.
I have just found this post, thank you! But something is very wrong with the article – the childcare thing just doesn’t work on any level. If between them mothers and fathers do 2 hours of childcare, what is happening the rest of the time? I have two young children and most days I would say I do 24 hours of childcare, about 13 during the day and then all night when i am on duty for night feedings and wakings. when I’m at work all day I do about 4 hours awake time and then all night as well. Even taking into account undemanding 17 year olds the hours don’t add up. How did they decide what time counted as childcare! Was it time playing with children? – in which case I can well believe it was comparable for men and women, or did it take account of all the time that a parent is responsible for the child and therefore cannot go somewhere else or leave the child? Also, whoever thought that 53 mins of cuildcare
[…] 70% of mothers nominated fathers as the main person ‘helping them out with childcare’. (Exactly how much help is going on, who knows, it doesn’t seem to have been asked but it would …) But here we go again. Fathers do not ‘help out with childcare’. They look after their […]
[…] https://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/before-we-call-a-truce-on-the-chore-war-2/ […]
Like Molly said above, the hours spent in child care each day seemed laughable for someone with three children under ten. I always wonder what exactly gets counted as child care in these studies.
Okay, the time I spend sitting chatting with a friend in between supervising squabbles at a local playground probably doesn’t, while bathing them and changing nappies does, but what about nursing them in the night, or for that matter in the day? What about when I’m trying to write (so theoretically I’m ‘working’ in the sort-of paid workforce), but getting interrupted every few minutes by my toddler? Actually I’m doing some level of child care almost every moment of the day until my kids are asleep (around 8pm), except on the one-two days a week I ‘get to’ go to work, and the odd child-free outing on a weekend. It’s not constant work, nor is it exclusively work. But whatever else I’m doing is, as someone else you quoted somewhere said, constantly interruptable and interrupted.
[…] latest American time-use data on couples (heteronormativity alert) and housework is interesting (no, the chore war is still not over!) but the bit I really find tell-tale is this little snippet towards the end: Almost all the extra […]
[…] have no fucking idea. This is a fantastic take on the problem, though. And this one. My mind is kind of reeling right now from the one-two punch of those […]
[…] Before we call a truce on the chore war […]
Here in Denmark, we have a term that could loosely be translated to ”Sandwich women”. It is used to descibe those women that have a full time job, young children and/or care-needing relatives like elderly parents/sick spouses. They are the ones who end up sick from stress, in psychiatric wards from panic attacs or depressions. So even here, the chore wars are not a thing of the past, we still carry the majority of the care work and organizing duties.
This is not a problem that is unique to north american women, I believe it is quite normal in western countries.
I always take heart from the japanese term: Ou-gomi – meaning large piece of refuse, used to describe recently retired husbands, who lounge around every day at home, being in the way all the time 🙂
That’s why men need to be an equal and necessary member of a household.
Please excuse my imperfect english 🙂
[…] for my PhD) to her excruciating points on relationships and the work therein, particularly for feminist women. In other words, you need to read her […]
The reason why it changes when a child comes along is because so many men do not want children, but only agree to it because they are afraid the women will leave them if they don’t. So, they are trying to make the woman see that having a child was a mistake, because now her life is a complete mess and she is stuck with almost all the domestic duties and almost all the childcare because he has to work more to earn the extra money they need now that they have a child. Of course, all he achieves is her leaving him anyway, so why can’t a few of them man up and say no to children when they clearly don’t want them? This is why there are so many messed up people out there – at least one of their parents didn’t want them!
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a all round interesting blog (I also love the theme/design), I don’t have time to read
it all at the minute but I have book-marked it and also
included your RSS feeds, so when I have time
I will be back to read more, Please do keep up the fantastic work.
[…] Before we call a truce on The Chore War. […]
I do accept as true with all the concepts you have introduced
to your post. They are really convincing and can definitely work.
Still, the posts are very brief for newbies. May you please extend them a bit
from subsequent time? Thanks for the post.